Hardly rushing in to things, we here present our 2011 Year in Review, recorded mid-February and published in the first few days of March. The Oscars for 2011 releases only happened this week, after all, and we don’t have their kind of budget — or Billy Crystal. Instead, we took vague inspiration from the “Golden Pints” lists that popped up around New Year’s, and take the chance to look back on the year past to pick out some themes and some favourites.

As always, a direct download is available, there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed, and you should be able to get us on iTunes. George and myself can also both be reached on the Twitterthing.

Show notes:

• (0.55) Admittedly, the gap between this episode and “s02e01” is probably going to be rather-shorter than many of the inter-episode gaps within “season one” — but please, allow us our (many) oddities.
• (1.35) Beer of the Week: Garage Project ‘Aro Street Pale Ale’ (a.k.a. ‘Phil Cook Touring Presents: Angry Peaches’) which was vaguely-birthed from our conversation back in the days of Episode V — when we had Oskar Blues ‘Gubna’.
• (3.30) If you weren’t already up with it, there’s a world of difference between Peaches (the musician), and ‘Peaches’ (the song). Worth knowing.
• (5.30) How could we — particularly, how could I — not be late with a Year in Review?
• (8.00) Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Crowshaw is rapidly amassing a brilliant body of work (this, of course is what happens when you post regularly — he says, chastising himself). He’s largely dropped the ‘Awards’ pretence, but they were great fun. Flash all the way back, for example, to 2008 or 2009 to see for yourself. 2008’s opening rant, particularly, helped me justify to myself the more-freewheeling nature of my Diary entries.
• (8.50) Greg Norman was ‘The Great White Shark’, apparently. Points to neither of us.
• (9.00) Blog of the Year: Alice Galletly’s ‘Beer for a Year’. We were actually recording, serendipitously enough, the very day she hit halfway. And, speaking of year-long projects worth knowing about, the throw-away reference I made was to the genuinely-entertaining A. J. Jacobs — his The Year of Living Biblically  was a Christmas present to me from George and his wife Robyn one year.
• (11.30) Website of the Year: craftbeercapital.com.
• (15.50) The “growler” story is developing rapidly… Doubtless I’ll get back to it.
• (17.00) 2011, Year of the x: The Beer Bar. I really need to get myself to Auckland and Christchurch to catch up with the scenes, there. It says a lot that, as a Wellington beer geek, I’m starting to get seriously jealous and frequently struck by the “damnit, I’m missing out” feeling. Weirdly, the local new bars didn’t spring to my mind as we were recording, but 2011 saw us blessed with the arrival of The Hop Garden and LBQ (Little Beer Quarter), as well — and not-quite-so-blessed with a few other… shall we say… craft-beer-themed bars.
• (23.00) Adrien Brody’s speech really, unfairly irritated me. It’s a thing, with me — but that might also partially be down to some Roman Polanski-related grumbles.
• (23.20) Beer of the Year: Matilda Bay ‘Fat Yak’ (for George) and Hallertau ‘Minimus’ (for Phil). We drank Fat Yak for Episode II, and I said nice things about its reliable Gatewayability in my Diary. I’ve had a long-running love affair with Minimus, and it helped inspire Episode IV.
• (29.20) Favourite Beer of Year: Garage Project ‘Day of the Dead’ (for Phil) and Liberty ‘C!tra’ (for George). And it seems I’m not alone —not that that thought worries me, in this field, or many others — the guys at the Garage Project released a little ‘report’ on feedback for the 24/24 series of beers, and “DotD” came out on top. ‘C!tra’ was beer of the week last time, for Episode VIII, and it really was crackingly good fun stuff.
• (32.30) George really did (eventually) get this right; he got married in late 2005.
• (33.30) Pleasant Surprise: Golden Ticket ‘Black Emperor’, with an honorable mention for Moa Imperial Stout (for Phil) and This Very Podcast Itself (for George). I’m a grumpy bastard in many ways, but I’m no dogmatist; I genuinely enjoy the cleansing feeling of changing my mind, and Black Emperor did exactly that.
• (38.40) Best Experimentation: The Yeastie Boys ‘Blondies’, with an honorable mention for the Liberty ‘Blondes’ (for Phil) and The Garage Project itself (for George), with particular nods for their green bean saison and the Grordbort beers. And seriously, flip back to George’s “live” tasting of Rex, way back in Episode III; I think it remains a classic.
• (46.30) Best Beer Moment: A three-way tie between Day of the Dead, The Trappist Dance Card, and ‘Angry Peaches’ at the Town Hall (for Phil) and quietly re-discovering ‘Discovery’ at Brühaus (for George).
• (52.00) Midstrength News is that I didn’t do my midstrength-related homework. George here is channelling the Thrilling Adventure Hour, a favourite of his.
• (52.30) Recommendation: Stone & Wood ‘Pacific Ale’. Pure gorgeousness.
• (56.30) Or, you know, two months. (He says, chastising himself again.)
• (56.45) Cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket.

Podcast episode recorded: 7 February 2012. Uploaded: 1 March 2012. Er, Happy New Year!

Welcome back and Happy New Year, everyone. My profuse apologies for the inadvertent summer hiatus — it’s ordinarily a stay indoors and hide from the heat and sunshine kind of time for me, mostly, but this year it just rather got away from me. Not in a bad way, at all, but an unintended effect was that the podcast which we intended would be a nice lead-up to Holiday Season imbibing has been held back until now. It’s entirely my fault — George is a diligent producer and does hassle me on your behalf, I assure you.

So anyway, inspired by the impending holidays — impending, that is, when we recorded — we have a little bit of a ramble about Strong Beer (partially also to balance the ledger after our Midstrength Beer episode). There are a lot of ways to be a strong beer, and equally-many reasons to enjoy one. And then there’s a fair amount of silliness in the field, too. But the point remains: there’s a beer for every occasion that might otherwise bring wine or whisky to the front of your mind.

As always, a direct download is available, there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed, and you should be able to get us on iTunes. George and myself can also both be reached on the Twitterthing.

Show notes:

• (0.45) Well, it’s been a while for you now, too, as I pre-emptively apologised for, above. The timing of the Beer Diary entries are a frequent cause of puzzlement, so I’ve taken New Years Resolution-esque steps to make them a little more reader-friendly and a little less puzzling. They always made sense in my head, but many objectively-mad things often seem to do so.
• (1.50) Midstrength beer was a little while ago.
• (2.45) Winter beer was also a little while ago. Slightly moreso, in fact.
• (3.20) Beer of the Week #1: Liberty ‘C!tra’. A sure-fire giveaway of me being a rather-appalling typography nerd is that I occasionally call an exclamation mark a “bang” — partially because that old practice today survives mostly in the name of my absolute-favourite punctuation mark, the interrobang (which also serves as my Twitter avatar / general logo-thing), and the rather-awesome shebang from the world of programming.¹
• (7.05) Martyn Cornell’s long-form history-dredging myth-busting posts are always a good read — if you’re into that sort of thing, and I am — and his one on Imperial Stout is no exception.
• (7.55) Epic’s ‘LARGER’ is the reference on my mind, here; its Wellington launch-party was in preparation as we recorded this. It turned out to be a real hoot — and not quite the absolute carnage that a suprisingly-drinkable 8.5% lager might imply.
• (8.45) Beer festivals, compared to ‘Midstrength beer’ and ‘Winter beer’, was not very long ago at all. But a while ago from here. See? Time is all sorts of relative.
• (10.20) ‘Strong beer’ and ‘expensive beer’ are fairly tightly correlated. Especially in a place like New Zealand, where the tax take is levied proportionately to booze, not just volume. But — and I say this as a member of a criminally-underpaid profession — one of the enduring charms about beer is this relative accessibility. Even the stupid-money end of the scale is much more within grab than the equivalent corners of, say, the wine or whisky markets.
• (14.50) To lift entirely a note from the Midstrength beer episode and thereby weirdly quote myself: “In New Zealand, beer under 1.15% attracts no excise tax; anything 1.15% – 2.5% is subject to 38.208¢ per litre of beverage; and all beer 2.5% and over is levied at $25.476 per litre of alcohol.”
• (15.00) Just to check in with Mr Google: “Imperial IPA” will get you more than a million hits, while “Imperial APA” brings in a relatively-poor 25,000-odd.
• (17.30) Inevitably, Martyn Cornell has covered this, too. You really should read him more often, if you don’t, whoever you are.
• (20.10) Garage Project’s American Barleywine, ‘Hellbender’, was a delicious thing, and a marvellous excuse for a good-natured nerdfight.
• (21.20) As a little tour of that particular corner of the Strong Beer world, I really do recommend that you punch out a whole Trappist Dance Card at least once in your life.
• (22.45) Beer of the Week #2: Twisted Hop ‘Red Zone Enigma’. I’m obviously way late for Christmas present recommendations, to the point where I’ve just clocked it and become way early. Myself and a few other local beer-people appeared in a short segment on Radio New Zealand’s ‘Summer Report’ where we raised the possibility of substituting-in a lovely big bottle of beer for the usual grape-juice-descended options — it’s difficult to directly link to, but filed under ‘Sparkling new beers may replace traditional bubbles’.
• (24.40) The iStout-through-a-Tim-Tam-straw suggestion came from a chap on the Twitters by the name of Dave Ellis. I only know him (so far; Hello!) in his Twittering capacity, but he’s clearly some sort of genius. George has got his Tim Tam History somewhat askew; a Chit Chat is a kind of knock-off copycat of a Tim Tam — but they were, themselves, apparently stolen from / “inspired by” a Penguin biscuit.
• (26.40) Adelaide beer blogger Aaron Caruana shares my Bletchley Park obsession — and, helpfully, went there recently and took lovely photos. Our brewing aspirations languished after a few dead batches. My moderate Canberra-based successes did not translate down to my Melbourne apartment, for some reason. Purple was definitely the Allied name for the Japanese machine, which actually carried the rather-marvellous name “System 97 Printing Machine for European Characters”. And Cryptonomicon remains my favourite novel, but does have a slightly memory-distorting effect (together with the Strong Beer), given its fictionalisations.
• (30.10) Three Boys ‘Aftershock’ was great on many levels.
• (33.30) My Christmas night BrewDog Paradox was sublime.
• (36.00) The German one, the name of which I couldn’t bring to mind / pronounce is Schorschbräu Schorschbock, the last (57%) edition of which was called ‘Finis Coronat Opus’. And really — though this may just be the inevitable prejudice you’d get from an English-speaker — BrewDog won this game, I think. Schorschbräu’s packaging and everything was just so po-faced and serious while the Scots were clearly taking the piss and having a laugh and bowed out spectacularly with End of History. And while BrewDog did recently announce that they’d walk away from the theatrics a bit, the campaign around Ghost Deer is pretty damn funny, too.
• (41.40) 8 Wired’s ‘Batch 18’ is fantastic, and still the as-far-as-I-can-tell strongest made here. Though there was some mention in The Pursuit of Hoppiness of him having plans to climb a few rungs higher on the boozeladder. But — I hasten to add, the day after publishing this and with great thanks to local good-beer-bar-frequenter David Wu  — it turns out we forgot all about Green Man’s barleywine, ‘Enrico’s Cure’, which weighs in at 14.5%, and does actually crow about being “New Zealand’s strongest beer” (true for now), “probably the world’s strongest organic beer” (which seems likely) and “one of the strongest beers in the world” (which definitely isn’t true, except for insanely-generous definitions of “one of”).
• (43.50) Ngahere Gold turns out to be 7.2%, and I know it may seem a little harsh of me to knock it and then go on to praise Epic ‘Larger’ — but I’ll either just wear the hypocrisy or argue that the latter just had enough fun and funny about it.
• (46.00) I’m somewhat shocked that I was closer to the mark than movie-geek George, on this one. Bruce Wayne doesn’t buy the restaurant; he buys the hotel.
• (46.30) Midstrength News & Recommendation: Cassels & Sons ‘Beer’. Alice Galletly did a great little write-up with it on her blog — which, itself, counts as an additional recommendation if you’re not reading her already. And then there’s Epic’s ‘LARGER’, which has now been and gone from our taps but is now skulking around in bottles. Not seeing the pun turned out to be a hilarious Elephant trap, into which even Wellington’s daily newspaper happily blundered. Kelly Ryan’s typically-informative blog post on the making-of confirms my Southern Holiday Beer theory, too, and would’ve been worth a read even if he’d proven me wrong.
• (52.20) I still haven’t had my Renaissance ‘Tribute’. It’s here beside me on my desk. And I haven’t figured out quite-why the name, either. So that’ll be my homework.
• (55.00) We’ll do a Year in Review episode, next, rather than a Christmas one as such. That’d obviously leave you waiting ages, now. But for now, cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket.

Podcast episode recorded: 3 December 2011, nearly relatively-promptly uploaded (I swear): 14 December 2011, and then only actually-for-serious uploaded: 24 January 2012. Sheesh.

1: Note also that the url format for Twitter pages includes a shebang before the username. Double geek-happiness, there.

After a Garage Project beer at Hashigo, George and I ventured out to the quiet outer suburbs to join Kieran Haslett-Moore in his in-house pub, the Masons Arms. Over a few of his beers (accompanied by a platter of delicious things he’d largely also made himself), we talked about the many roads to being a satisfied beer geek, pondered the idiosyncrasies of the Wellington craft beer scene and the wider industry at large. Towards the end, we picked up on the topic George and I had talked about last time, and discussed a few weirdnesses of beer award shows.

Kieran’s got a blog, which helpfully reproduces his Capital Times columns, and has quite-recently joined the Twitters. As always, a direct download is available, there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed, and you should be able to get us on iTunes. George and myself can also both be reached on the Twitterthing.

Show notes:

• (0.40) The Masons Arms, among its many charms, has a Pub Dog. Which makes for interestingly-challenging podcast recording, but adds to the ambience. As always, George was greatly helped in smoothing out the worst of it by the cleverness of Audacity, the open-source audio editor he uses.
• (4.10) Not yet. Things are a little in-the-air in that neighbourhood, given a moderately-controversial proposed roading redevelopment.
• (5.30) Beer of the Week #1: Kieran’s own ‘Berhampore Best Bitter’. We liked it so much that we took a photo of our lovely microphone in front of it, so it could be our “logo”, such as we have, on iTunes and whatnot.
• (8.20) I am chronically Auckland-phobic, but feedback on a recent podcast pondering has me determined to make the trip up in January. Let’s see if it changes my mind.
• (9.30) For completeness’ sake: here’s me in the paper, admitting exactly that.
• (10.10) Frasier Crane once said it well: “If less is more, imagine how much more more would be.”
• (17.00) The Emerson’s ‘JP’ we mention here has popped up in my Diary at least twice before. It’s reliably- and appropriately-interesting stuff, each year.
• (23.00) Beer of the Week #2: Emerson’s ‘RSB: Regional Special Bitter’. A video of the brew day has since shown up on YouTube; it’s an instructive watch, if you haven’t seen this kind of thing, especially at this kind of scale, in action.
• (26.50) Recent ramblings on collaborations can be found in my Diary entries for ‘Rescue Red’ and ‘Taranaki Pale Ale’. Long may the trend continue.
• (34.00) The Wassail Brauhaus in Taranaki looks as awesome as their website looks retro and clunky — they are, one assumes, too busy doing more interesting things. I’m totally going to get myself there later this summer, hopefully on the way to / from a brew day at Liberty.
• (36.50) Fuller’s 1845 gets two entries on here (so far), because there was that occasion when a customer insisted I have one — and the time I’d had it before but completely forgotten about, because my memory is complete rubbish.
• (38.30) It doesn’t feel overly plug-ish to note that Regional’s website is now positively groaning under the weight of beers from all over. If you’re not familiar with them, you really should pay them a visit online and/or in person.
• (41.20) I really am surprised that the ‘Craft Beer Capital’ website hasn’t really kicked up much controversy. It’s being kept quite neutral and ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ in its approach, so far, and that must be helping. I should disclaim that I know the people working for it, and that it does share some owners with the pub I work at — but I do think it could mature into a genuinely useful resource.
• (42.20) General Practitioner (which Kieran does mention as I talk over him a bit; sorry) is a shining example. Always a Monteith’s-branded DB-tied venue, they’ve recently arranged for a dozen-plus lines of craft beer in their fridge.
• (46.30) Renaissance ‘Stonecutter’ is totally my bet for greatest, most unexpected Gateway Beer — Episode III was partially a love-song thereto. And I wasn’t kidding: ‘Chick Beer’ really is a thing. Or hopefully merely was a thing; their own website seems dead. Good riddance.
• (50.00) Recommendations: Moa Imperial Stout, for its inherent goodness, and its one-or-two counter-trend aspects. (And because it’s nice to say something nice about them for a change.)
• (57.30) The History of IPA is so myth-ridden that Martyn Cornell really has turned it into a nice little cottage industry. Being wrong about this stuff is an exhilarating and delightful experience; myth-busting history is the best kind.
• (1.01.00) Beer of the Week #3: Kieran’s own ‘Merchant of the Devil’ Imperial Stout. Which is us pausing Midstrength News for a week quite emphatically indeed. It was stupidly good.
• (1.05.00) Further to my ramblings in the last episode, I still do think there’s room for another kind of beer awards (whether or not as part of the existing structure), but the Beer Cup, with its head-to-head setup, isn’t what I see as the way forward — barrel of fun though it did appear from here.
• (1.08.00) This difference between medal classes and trophy classes is massively under-explained, to the public. Something definitely needs to be done about it; we’re definitely agreed on that.
• (1.11.30) It’ll be a while yet before I’m done singing the praises of Steve Nally and his Invercargill Brewery. Most recently, on here, it was his ‘Sa!son’ that inspired me. I’ve also had that 2008 Vintage ‘Smokin’ Bishop’, since recording this, and it was pretty damn tasty — though still enjoyably peculiar. Consider it another Recommendation, just suitably late to the table.
• (1.14.35) Cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket.

Podcast episode recorded: 6 September 2011. Appallingly-belatedly uploaded: 4 December 2011

Back again for Episode VI — and please do excuse the Rugby World Cup and other related delays in the posting — George and I had a bit of a Beervana 2011 debrief and ponder. He wasn’t able to make the festival itself, but I had a great afternoon and offer some thoughts (almost entirely positive, which is rare for me) on the changes in direction that the festival took this year.

We also have a bit of ramble about the related Beer Awards, where the critical circuits of my brain get a bit more a workout. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, here; I’d love to see greater clarity, more-interesting categories / awards — and, crucially, a bit of gate-keeping to prevent breweries gaming the system by entering beers in categories that go against their own marketing just for the sake of increased odds of winning. It’s a controversial subject, and we do return to it a bit in the next episode, so consider this Part One of a longer discussion — and jump in below, in the comments.

As always, a direct download is available, there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed, and you should be able to get us on iTunes. George and myself can both be reached on the Twitterthing.

Show notes:

• (1.05) Beer of the Week: 8 Wired ‘The Sultan’.
• (2.30) I totally got the math reference right. But I don’t have email addresses for any of my high school math teachers. Who were, in hindsight, universally great.
• (2.50) I discussed the “Enkel, Dubbel, Tripel” ladder of naming back when The Thirsty Boys and I did our Trappist Dance Card tasting.
• (3.20) Gawd, the Garage Project episode was “last week”? I’m way late posting this. George has dutifully been hassling me. He’s an excellent producer. I’m just inordinately slack / distracted.
• (4.10) I couldn’t easily find whether The Sultan was entered; results sheets don’t list the “also-ran” beers. I shall have to ask Søren himself and will amend this note with any later news — rather than procrastinating further.
• (6.10) That’s us abnormally-shut-up by our Beer of the Week. Also, I really do apologise for not getting a photo of the beer in the glass.
• (6.30) My thoughts on Taieri George, Hot Cross Buns, and Easter in general have been chronicled here before, unsurprisingly.
• (8.00) A run-down of recent award-winners is handily available on the Brewers Guild website.
• (9.10) Sutton Group make neither socks nor munitions, it seems. But rather are an impressively-varied maker-of-stuff for the food industry.
• (15.40) I wasn’t quite sure how the Trophy-and-Medal Category system worked — which also is itself, I suppose, a mild meta-criticism of the process — but in hindsight, I assume that PKB was entered into an “American-style Porter” sub-sub-category and then went on to take the gong among those other sub-styles lumped into its Trophy Category. It’s a confusing system, and we’ll talk more about that aspect of it with Kieran, next time…
• (18.00) DB’s double-dealing on Tui is even bolder than I mention here, now that I think of it: Tui ‘Blond’ has a big-ass stamp on the box (as you can see above, and damn it felt strange putting it up on the same row, even, as photos of The Sultan) saying “NZ’s Best Lager”, when it was awarded nothing of the sort — it took out one of many sub-categories of lager, not some overall best-best. So DB will crow about an award, alright, but they remain eerily silent about the winningness of their winningest beer, Tui itself. One hopes that’s just because the shame of a medal that logically entails that you’re a bunch of liars in your brandwank is too much to bear.
• (23.00) Part of what’s behind the “inexcusable clumping” will be explained by Kieran next time. But it’s just an account of why and how it happened, not a defence… It’s the Trophies people talk about, and the clumping is a mess.
• (27.10) #callback: Our ongoing “strawberry-flavoured beer” nemesis dates back to Episode One.
• (28.30) There, that’s the other analogy we needed. Beer awards are a lot like Crufts Dog Show, and a lot like the DSM (the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders“).
• (32.20) I probably shouldn’t name names. Usefully, my memory is crap.
• (34.00) The origin story for Jed’s Beer Project is an unsurprisingly-good read, and — you know, while you’re there — he’s also got a great Beervana 2011 gallery. The seventh photo is me, putting on an appallingly-staged Serious Taster Face — but mostly I like the dude in the Viking helmet, behind me.
• (37.30) Thanks, George, for not editing that out.
• (40.00) Some brewers — like Stu, as you can see above — short-circuited the new plan somewhat, by volunteering. Though he was very much multi-tasking, as you can see by his plural t-shirts.
• (43.50) If you haven’t heard it before, George’s first-and-probably-last-ever ‘Rex Attitude’ which we recorded “live to tape” (as they say), is worth a listen.
• (44.30) My “conflict of interest”, such as it is, is declared in the ‘About’ whatsit…
• (44.50) The Pacific Beer Expo, trademark or no, was brilliant fun. It deserves a proper write-up, and it’ll get one, eventually. But it deserves one sooner. George wasn’t able to attend that one, either — hence no Live Recording.
• (47.00) Midstrength News: Yeastie Boys ‘PKB: Weemix’. Given the ultra-lag we’re dealing with here, my recommendation is tragically late. But hopefully it’ll return. Hint, hint, Stu — hint, hint. Weirdly, I’m just writing up a ‘Taranaki Session Beer’ entry concurrently to finally putting this thing together.
• (49.30) Recommendations: ParrotDog ‘BitterBitch’. Which really was a stupid-fast seller. ‘BloodHound’, their second beer, was launched at the aforementioned Pacific Beer Expo, and is now taking its turn selling like hot pants. (Also, they totally had a parrot.)
• (53.00) Aucklanders are actually increasingly lucky in the beer sense. I’ll have to do a round-up post about the Big City Beer Scene. Alice Galletly, on her marvellous ‘Beer for a Year’ blog, did do a great report on ‘Vasta’s Velvet’. Looks like I should’ve made the trip up; it was apparently delicious.
• (55.40) Cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket.

At-long-last posted: 22 November 2011